In the histоry оf religiоns, few stories аre more drаmаtic than that of the Mormons. It is a story of divine revelations and of persecution. In the spring of 1820, Joseph Smith, Jr., went into the woods near Palmyra, New York, to seek divine guidance. According to his account, a brilliant light revealed two personages who told him that all existing churches were false. Three years later, young Smith reported another supernatural experience. This time a personage visited his bedroom and said that God had work for him to do. The spectral visitor told him of a set of buried golden plates that contained a lost section from the Bible. The next morning at Hill Cumorah, Smith unearthed the golden plates, though he was forbidden to reveal their existence for four years. In 1827 Smith translated the plates into English, and finally in 1830 he published the messages on the plates as the Book of Mormon. Establishing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Smith attracted several thousand followers from rural areas of the North and the frontier Midwest. The converts were usually small farmers, mechanics, and traders who had been displaced. Because Smith said that he conversed with angels and received direct revelations from God, local authorities threatened to indict him for blasphemy. He and his followers responded by moving to Ohio, where they built their first temple and experimented with an economy controlled by the church. When they moved to Missouri, the Mormons were attacked by proslavery mobs accusing them of inciting slave insurrections. Mormon farms and houses were burned or seized and 18 Mormon men and boys were killed. Fifteen thousand Mormons fled Missouri after the governor proclaimed them enemies who “had to be exterminated, or driven from the state.” Moving again, this time to Illinois, trouble arose again. The Mormons were denounced for practicing polygamy, and Joseph Smith was attacked for trying to become “king or lawgiver to the church.” Under the protection of the Illinois governor, Smith and his brother were then confined to a jail cell in Carthage. Late in the afternoon of June 27, 1844, a mob broke into Smith’s cell, shot him and his brother, and threw their bodies out of a second-story window. Today it is hard to believe that the Mormons were ever regarded as subversive, and that Reverend Finish Ewing announced that “the Mormons are the common enemy of mankind and ought to be destroyed.” (Martin et al., pp. 433–435) Joseph Smith found the golden plates in
In 1831, newspаpers repоrted with аlаrm that the disease, chоlera, had escaped frоm its Asian homeland and that it was marching westward across Europe. The press had turned shrill when cholera crossed the Atlantic Ocean—the last great barrier that shielded the Americas from this horrible plague. Cholera struck Canada in June 1832. Despite the certainty that the disease would soon reach the United States, neither the federal, state, nor local governments did much to prevent or even prepare for an epidemic. Nothing in their inventory of illnesses, not even the ravages of smallpox or malaria, had prepared Americans for the terror that seized them when cholera finally appeared. Their fear is easily understood: Cholera killed approximately half of those who contracted it, and it struck with unbelievable rapidity. Cholera’s symptoms, which mimic those of severe arsenic poisoning, are indeed spectacular. The onset of the disease is marked by uncontrollable vomiting and violent abdominal cramps. Within hours, this sudden and massive loss of fluids causes dehydration, and the victim’s extremities feel cold, the face turns blue, and the feet and hands appear dark and swollen. Death can follow within a few hours after the first symptoms appear. Even more than its devastating symptoms was the disease’s ability to kill so swiftly that terrorized the public. “To see individuals well in the morning and buried before night is something which is appalling to the boldest heart,” exclaimed a survivor of America’s first cholera epidemic. Although dirty hands or raw fruits and vegetables often transmit the disease, most cholera epidemics are spread by polluted drinking water from sewage-contaminated water systems. Unfortunately, America’s cities in 1832 harbored more than enough filth to nurture an epidemic. New York was especially dirty. Residents were required by law to pile their garbage in the gutter in front of their homes for removal by the city, but it seldom got collected. Thanks to this filth, cholera unleashed a great plague of death when it reached New York. Thousands died in the epidemic, producing so many bodies that the undertakers could not keep up with the volume and had to stack corpses in warehouses and public buildings to await burial. In the midst of their suffering, New Yorkers could not help but wonder why some people contracted the disease while others escaped it. To answer this question, America’s physicians espoused a doctrine of predisposing causes: people who kept God’s laws, they explained, had nothing to fear, but the intemperate and filthy stood at great risk. Cholera receded from the land almost as quickly as it had come. By the fall of 1832 the epidemic had spent its fury, and by the winter it was gone. When it struck again in 1866, Americans had learned how to battle the disease. They no longer talked about cholera in moral terms as God’s vengeance on the poor and the wicked. Instead, they approached it as a social problem responsive to human intervention. They imposed quarantines, opened emergency hospitals, increased the power of health authorities, removed the trash and garbage from city streets, and cleaned up municipal water supplies. The contrast between 1832 and 1866 was evident. (Martin et al., pp. 322–323) As used in the passage, appalling is the best defined as
Anоther sign stimulus, оf cоurse, is sound. A mаle bird’s song аttrаcts females and repels competitors. Thus, it acts as a signal to birds of the same species. Male grasshoppers also attract females with a song. The Ephippizer bitterensis, a grasshopper found along the Mediterranean coast of France, uses an organ borne on its back to produce a strident sound. Modified wing-like structures are scraped against each other to produce thissound, which is then amplified by a small shell. When females hear this sound, they scramble [move quickly] toward it, climbing over any obstacles that are in their way, and speeding up as they come close to their mates. Scientists who have studied the sound made by the Ephippizer bitterensis have found that the females respond to almost any sharp sound, even hand clapping. Copying the exact sound is not necessary; what matters is the sharpness and the quickness with which the sound is interrupted and resumed. The main idea of this passage can be found